There can be little doubt that the trickling down of digital technology has had a profound effect on the music industries. From its infancy as the preserve of elite recording artists through to the present day where pestilence has made abundantly clear the extent to which we rely upon digital means in our everyday lives, digital technology continues to shape and define practice; not only in our work as musicians and/or researchers, but also how we choose to spend our leisure time. Consequently, the opportunities, limitations and implications presented by digital technologies have deservedly become a key area for investigation and documentation.
Schoop's compelling account of DIY music-making in the Philippines presents another welcome addition to the growing body of literature which is increasingly asking us to turn away from our embarrassingly anglophone research programme.
The research, which was originally published in 2017 but only last year became available in paperback, is a fitting reminder of how fleeting our new (and evolving) digital realities have become post-internet. Schoop can therefore provide us with only a mere snapshot of Filipino music-making from the turn of the last decade until approximately 2015. The difficulty in dating this research is a particularly digital phenomenon. The author contends that despite concluding the ethnographic fieldwork in March 2014, she was able, by virtue of social media, to remotely monitor and engage with the field beyond the given end-date. It must also be noted however, that Schoop credits internet technologies as both genesis and nexus of this research project. Initial engagement and preliminary research were undertaken and certainly only possible to such an extent by means of virtual interaction via digital media.
Part 1 of the book presents a detailed introduction to the local Philippine music industries which are primarily centred around the capital, Manilla. The city, typical of many major population centres in South East Asia, consists of a congested agglomeration of interlinking cities within the wider metropolitan area. The independent scene in Metro Manilla is clustered near the relatively prosperous university district of Quezon City in the east of the region. Schoop commendably pays diligent attention to the specific socio-economic conditions of modern Philippine life and finds that only those from the privileged echelons of Filipino society can afford to engage in musical activity both as producer and albeit to a lesser extent, a consumer. The radio remains the primary medium for musical consumption among the majority of the population; however, more active forms of consumer participation in the Music Industry, such as attending performances and purchasing records, remain the preserve of the Filipino elite.
We learn that, from the outset, digital technologies have profoundly affected the structure of the local Filipino music industries perhaps to a greater extent than we can appreciate in the developed north. Policy response to digital piracy, we are led to believe, was able to stem the flow of revenue loss experienced by the recording industry at the turn of the century. However, we now know that the rise of streaming media should also be considered culpable in taming the disruption caused by new media potentials, providing free, convenient and legalised access to inconsumable depths of recorded material seemingly sated our desire for dodgy digital dalliance.
This was certainly not the case in the Philippines where popular (and official) consideration of intellectual property rights remains low on the list of priorities in many developing nations. The emergence of digital media and its potential for infinite replicability and instant global distribution dealt the deathblow to an already beleaguered mainstream music industry culminating with the withdrawal of all major interest prior to the time of publication. This void remains largely unfilled by Filipino artists with international stars dominating airplay and sales (pirated or otherwise). Nevertheless, the global dissemination of digital technology has enabled the development of a nascent independent scene. This scene and its shared behaviours, attitudes and practices becomes the focus of Part 2 of the research.
This neatly structured section dedicates chapters to each of the key functions in the business of music; production, distribution, promotion and the financing of these operations. In this, Schoop confirms the suspicions of many that grassroots musical production in the digital age has become rather homogenised. This includes praxis in terms of home (DIY) production, centrality of social media for promotional activities and an ambivalence towards technology and its affordances characterised by a particularly apolitical attitude towards engagement in the industry. Such findings are consistent with similar studies conducted in Poland (Galuszka & Wyrzykowka Reference Galuszka, Wyrzykowska, Mazierska, Gillon and Rigg2019) and even as far away as Bolivia (Stobart Reference Stobart2006, Reference Stobart2010).
What is of particular interest in this research, however, are the local particularities which shine a light onto our inherent cultural quirks, flying in the face of popular globalisation rhetoric. Crowdfunding, for example, has failed to present a viable, consistent option for securing finance for musical production. This is in-part due to the intermittent nature of internet access in the Philippines, coupled with a general mistrust of e-commerce throughout a significant portion of the population. Quite simply, many people do not have bank accounts and are consequently unable to participate in many of the web-based forms of consumption we have grown accustomed to at home.
The research for this book took place before the mass adoption of streaming media, which unfortunately means that we are left guessing at how access to services such as Spotify has further impacted the local music scene. Schoop, however, hints at a continuation of this programme which I for one will await with bated breath. This edition whets the appetite for more about the uptake of new technologies in the developing world. Developments in streaming media as well as the potential for the nationalist authoritarian Duterte government to profoundly impact mainstream engagement in the liberal arts presents an intriguing proposition for further investigation. This book, while only able to provide us with a glimpse of a now past reality of musical production in a developing economy, finds that its greatest contribution nevertheless exceeds the boundaries of popular music studies and serves as an important document in a much wider interdisciplinary agenda: seeking to trace and understand longitudinally the relationship between digital technologies and cultural convergence on a global scale.
